ENERGODAR

His exhibition ENERGODAR presents a set of new works created out of a spatial as well as (a)temporal journey on Ukranian roads connecting the « Atomgrad » cities. Film, wall painting, engravings and architect drawings are featured in this exhibition, in search of a possible representation of this world in suspension, immersed in a frozen present and stripped of its past utopias.

The exhibition starts silently in the form of a tribute to 1980s Soviet rock. The wall painting placed at the entrance reproduces one of the mythical jackets of Russian band Kino, Eto nie Lioubov (« This Is Not Love »). Its graphic style, quite similar to that of western rock in the 1970s, raises the issue of sources and their connections from the very beginning of the show.
Yet Kino soon becomes one of the possible entrance points in the imagination of the artist, who uses some of the band’s songs on the soundtrack of Energodar, his new film projected in the same space. Created out of images shot in Ukraine during the summer of 2009, Energodar invites the spectator to an urban wandering supplemented with various sound sources mixing new creations, Russian and British archives, and the personal narrative of several events of the 1970s and 1980s. While the 36-minute film begins with the image of one of the last extant statues of Lenin overlooking the Zaporizhia hydroelectric power plant, it ends with the increasingly oppressive images of the now inactive radar nicknamed « the Russian Woodpecker. » Energodar (the word means « the gift of energy ») touches indirectly on the energetic decay characterizing these regions today. It is also the name of one of these « Atomgrads, » the dormitory cities located near nuclear plants, the remnants of past urban and scientific breakthroughs, at a time when nuclear workers were considered as genuine heroes, right after cosmonauts, as Victor (the narrator) explains. Their identity of planned cities, following a similar urban model that evokes the Benjaminian notion of technical reproducibility applied to architecture, has much to do with the artist’s preoccupations. Besides, their recent and tragic history has turned these geometric spaces into organized places just as they were also left in a state of complete neglect. Pripyat thus presents a ghostly environment, frozen as a kind of contemporary Pompei. A pilot city and an architectural matrix in the 1970s, it was also a satellite city of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and was deserted after the disaster. Once more, Louidgi Bletrame makes the city the main character of his film, in which humans only walk across the frame, the last appeal to a possible reality. Like Italo Calvino walking through invisible cities that do not appear in any atlas, Louidgi Beltrame takes us into a secret stroll between urban planning and landscape that borrows from his encounters with architecture and its cinematic potential. Tarkovsky’s character Stalker, whose apparition we watch out for to enter the zone, seems to haunt this unidentified visual object which ends with images of an exuberant nature, suggesting that it is reclaiming territory lost to urban planning.

Reversing chronological order to modify the structure of the exhibition in the image of the film, the artist deliberately chooses to end with the beginning. In the last room a series of six copper plates returns to the sources of the project, its point of departure. Taken from the proceedings of the Seventh Conference of the International Union of Architects, which took place in Havana in 1963 and was devoted to the reconstruction of cities, six photographs – post-constructivist in their composition, between technical architectural image and propaganda – are reproduced through an analogical, entropic technique that makes visible the marks of the production process. A potential medium for the printing of propaganda posters, the plates appear as the deactivated tools of a paralyzed society.

The sculptural object has undergone a radical redefinition since the 1960s. Indeed, even ruined sites become sculptures, with the spectator being invited to contemplate examples of architecture and sculpture in a state of advanced decay and entropy. Superimposing different historical strata and architectural, musical, cultural, ideological, or political events, Louidgi Beltrame does away with narrative threads and positions himself alongside the spectator as the unobtrusive witness of a certain reality. At the turn of the 1990s writer Antoine Volodine came up with the concept of post-exoticism to avoid categorization as science-fiction. The concept, completely hollow initially, now conveys issues tied to space in prison, the failure of revolutionary struggles, utopias and their degeneration… Neither scientific nor fictional, documentary or journalistic, while all of these at the same time, « Energodar » also generates its own independence and legitimacy.

The exhibition was supported by the CNAP, la Ville de Paris and l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Bourges.